Best 407 quotes in «pregnancy quotes» category

If you want to know the value of a month, ask a pregnant woman, if a month matters in her pregnancy.

I have a question. Is it okay to drink while you're pregnant...if you're planning on giving the baby up for adoption?

I have started looking into the mirror more often. I have pigmentation, a few blemishes. My body never looked like this, never felt like this- heavy, tired, exhausted, swollen, achy, weak. There are a million reasons to not like myself right now. But one reason that outgrows all these emotions- I am the first home to my baby. A woman can dislike her body, can she really dislike her baby’s abode? Therefore, I love the way it’s swelling- it gives my baby’s tiny arms and legs more space. I love the way it’s pigmenting, it gives my baby better protection from the sun. I love the way it’s exhausted, it prioritises baby’s nutritional requirements over mine. And I would love all the stretch marks in the end too. That’s my baby’s name plate at his first home.

I hoped what little dinner I'd eaten wasn't something my new baby-rich body didn't like. I didn't want to throw up all over the bad guys, or then again maybe I did. It would certainly be distracting.

I hope that teen moms realize that their path to success still exists, and the only way to achieve it is to make the decision to go after it.

I’m going to make you come shopping with me for maternity clothes." "I can handle it. In fact, I’m rather looking forward to you having a bump." He smoothed a hand across my stomach, something he’d taken to doing a lot. "My bump? Why?" "It’s a caveman thing," he joked. "Elaborate." I repeated his word back at him. [...] "When every man sees our bump, they’ll know I was the one you let inside you, they’ll know you’re mine and I’m yours, and that growing inside you is our kid.

Imperfections, if we allowed them, can help to create a blinding love to fill a perfectly, imperfect life.

I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.” She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction. “Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.

I'm not important, having a child is not an amazing feat, and my child, while extraordinarily important to and beloved by her parents, is not particularly special in the scheme of things.

In classical art this 'aura' surrounding motherhood depicts repose. The dominant culture projects pregnancy as a time of quiet waiting. We refer to the woman as 'expecting,' as though this new life were flying in from another planet and she sat in her rocking chair by the window, occasionally moving the curtain aside to see whether the ship is coming. The image of uneventful waiting associated with pregnancy reveals clearly how much the discourse of pregnancy leaves out the subjectivity of the woman. From the point of view of others pregnancy is primarily a time of waiting and watching, when nothing happens. For the pregnant subject, on the other hand, pregnancy has a temporality of movement, growth, and change. The pregnant subject is not simply a splitting which the two halves lie open and still, but a dialectic. The pregnant woman experiences herself as a source and participant in a creative process. Though she does not plan and direct it, neither does it merely wash over; rather, she is this process, this change. Time stretches out, moments and days take on a depth because she experiences more changes in herself, her body. Each day, each week, she looks at herself for signs of transformation... For others the birth of an infant may only be a beginning, but for the birthing woman it is a conclusion as well. It signals the close of a process she has been undergoing for nine months, the leaving of this unique body she has moved through, always surprising her a bit in its boundary changes and inner kicks. Especially if this is her first child she experiences the birth as a transition to a new self that she may both desire and fear. She fears a loss of identity, as though on the other side of the birth she herself became a transformed person, such that she would 'never be the same again.

Inside, the midwife was trying to get Socorro to open her mouth wide and let the pain come out. "Open your mouth," said Angelina, massaging Socorro's neck and shoulders, "and let out what you feel. Don't keep it in, querida, let it out." Socorro cried softly at first, but little by little she loosened up and she began to let out long, ear-piercing screams. "Good," said the midwife, "now breathe deeply, deeply, and then cry out again, letting all the pain go out of your body.

...in early pregnancy her ability to tolerate heat stress improves by about 30 percent and in late pregnancy by at least 70 percent. Indeed, when a woman exercises at 65 percent of her maximum capacity in late pregnancy, her peak core temperature during exercise does not even get up to the level it was at rest before she became pregnant.

In M---, an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O---, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; that she was resolved, out of consideration to her family, to marry him.

In the Bible, a woman was made from a man. In real life, a man is made from a woman.

I stared at her - unable to accept that at one time I was growing inside her. I was once just a couple of cells. My father and my mother were naked something had to be satisfactory about it, because he came inside her and she got pregnant. She, like me, was once a baby in her mother's stomach and so on and so forth and so it goes. So it goes.

Isn’t it wonderful to give birth to your own kind?

Is the any spectacular moment like the angelic birth of a child?

I still couldn't imagine that she was really, truly pregnant; maybe this was an hysterical pregnancy. But Sarah was never hysterical. Enthusiastic, yes, ironic on occasion. I couldn't imagine a doctor saying, "No, it's just an ironic pregnancy.

Is any child at birth, born in a cage?

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

I will hold my babies in my hand at sacred-time.

It seems that in our twenty-first century modern world, many women have become estranged from their primal brain and the knowledge that lies within it. Women too often hand their power over to the medical world long before they enter labour and have the idea someone else will do it for them.

I was pregnable once,” Merill thought to contribute. She remembered how troublesome it made getting around, having a ripe belly. Couldn’t roll properly, couldn’t hop properly, couldn’t romp or flop properly. There were the cravings for roasted cabbage—she loathed cabbage, with its leaves and growing in rows. And labor! Merill passed out during childbirth. She’d endured burns, lacerations, rips, serrated teeth, nails, hooks and a trove of unmentionable harm-inflictors. Labor trounced them all and wriggled gleefully in the spray of blood and gore. “Being pregnable is no good. No good at all. Like growing a bitter melon in your belly.

It is one thing, I was discovering, to think, "Maybe I won't have kids," and quite another to be told, "Maybe you can't." This is how impatience turns to desperation.

I want you to know that you were wanted. I decided: I wanted you. Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man.

I was with two men that night, Mom! The baby could be either of theirs!

Many parents love their children. Yet they make them suffer a lot in the name of love. They’re often not capable of understanding their children’s suffering, difficulties, hopes, and aspirations. We have to ask ourselves, “Am I really loving the other person by understanding them or am I just projecting my own needs?

Many of us are failed secret attempts to keep our parents together.

Many women describe the feeling of having a baby come out of their vagina as taking the biggest shit of their lives. This isn’t really a metaphor. The anal cavity and vaginal canal lean on each other; they, too, are the sex which is not one. Constipation is one of pregnancy’s principal features: the growing baby literally deforms and squeezes the lower intestines, changing the shape, flow, and plausibility of one’s feces. In late pregnancy, I was amazed to find that my shit, when it would finally emerge, had been deformed into Christmas tree ornament — type balls. Then, all through my labor, I could not shit at all, as it was keenly clear to me that letting go of the shit would mean the total disintegration of my perineum, anus, and vagina, all at once. I also knew that if, or when, I could let go of the shit, the baby would probably come out. But to do so would mean falling forever, going to pieces.

Looking at the children, she knew that any hope for a new life would have to grow within her. She glanced at Nate, wondering if he felt as she did, that children were the only consolation in this world, the only recompense for so much suffering.

Lying by Johannes in the darkness, envying him the unquestioned habit of sleep, the way he could remove himself, I wished that I might pause, take stock; that is a thought that comes back to me now: that I would like to pause pregnancy like a film, to walk away, do something else, returning later when I have had time to rest or think. I had always, before my pregnancy, regarded my body as a kind of tool, a necessary mechanism, largely self-sustaining, which, unless malfunctioning, did what I instructed of it, and so to have my agency so abruptly curtailed, revealed as little more than conceit, felt like betrayal. I no longer listened to my own command. Inside me, while I wished that I might be able to be elsewhere, that I might leave my body in the frowsty sheets and go downstairs to sit in the dark kitchen, unswollen and cool, cells split to cells, thoughtless and ascending, forming heart and lungs, eyes, ears- a hand grew nails- this child already going about its business, its still uncomprehending mind unreachable, apart.

Most parents would not worry too much about their children if they knew that children belong not to their parents but to life.

Most of us cling to life as if our existence were a result of our deed or choice.

Men need women. Women need men.

Miraculous is divine.

Mom and dad probably told you I've been arrested. I'm innocent. I want you to know that.

Never give a lousy person the opportunity to create lousy babies.

Not only a pregnant woman is an outrage toward ethics but also an attack on aesthetics. Motherhood degrades women, it turns them into cows. With the forgiveness of cows, my sisters.

No, I'm the human here. I'm the life at stake. I'm the one with fingernails, who feels pain. Me.

No one knows we're there, no one sees us. We never leave the room. I think about the secret voice you use when you make love. No one but that person will ever hear it. And here, we listen to each other, but we lock it in with touch, and the room vacuum seals it to stay fresh until we can breathe together again. When he breaks the silence it is to say, "I want you to know that, when you get pregnant, nothing is going to change except your dress size.

Now she felt good. She felt great. She loved her swelling body, loved how everyone gave way before her, paid her tribute, wanted to touch her arm or shoulder. In the mirror, her face glowed. Her days of nausea were forgotten. Pregnancy was easy, it was a breeze on a summer day.

Of all the guile! How can you be objective? You have no perspective! You’re only 16!

Part of me just wants to force-feed these women some spoonfuls of fatty pâté. But another part of me is dying to know their secrets. Having kids who sleep well, wait and don’t whine surely helps them stay so calm. But there’s got to be more to it. Are they secretly struggling with anything? Where’s their belly fat? If this is all a façade, what’s behind it? Are French mothers really perfect? And if so, are they happy?

Oh, and you accuse me of flattery! Here I waddle about like a fat old duck and you try to tell me I'm lovely.

Oh my God!” Sam said again, his voice shaking. I’ve given birth to something inhuman, Phoebe thought. A lamprey with row after row of teeth.

Perhaps the Queen's prayers, and those of Bernard, had been efficacious, or perhaps Louise had been more attentive in bed, for during 1145--the exact date is not recorded--she bore a daughter, who was named Marie in honour of the Virgin. If the infant was not the male heir to France so desired by the King--the Salic law forbade the succession of females to the throne--her arrival encouraged the royal parents to hope for a son in the future. Relationships between aristocratic parents and children were rarely close. Queens and noblewomen did not nurse their own babies, but handed them over at birth into the care of wet nurses, leaving themselves free to become pregnant again.

Pregnancy sucks the nightlife out of you.

Physicality’s a cage. And a liberation. The cells I’ll fill in, they’re magnificent, burgeoning with aliveness! I’m dialed into them like a station on a radio transmitting constantly. First faint and distant, but growing, amassing, volumizing the very idea of a person this body aims to harbor. Glowing like the universe, always growing. Each new cell increases my momentum, tightening the tether.

Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact.

Pregnancy does not limit lung function, and both pregnancy and exercise improve the ability of body tissues to take up and utilize oxygen.